The full-blood, six-foot-six Cherokee speaker held up a bound document two or three hundred pages deep. “This is the Dawes Roll and it’s gold for anyone looking for their Oklahoma ancestors, or who have questions. I had a lot, and still do, but now all the old people are gone and I can’t ask them. This helped me find a few I didn’t know about.”
I perked up at the session, though I’d been listening carefully to his discussion of the Trail of Tears and his grandmother who loved to tell stories.
“Please feel free to come look at this when I’m finished.” Now in his late seventies, John Grits continued to tell the story of his people and family to the attendees at the Western Writers of America conference, and my mind went back to so many things I wish I’d asked my old people.
They weren’t much storytellers, but I learned to sit quiet in a living room, on the front porch, out in the yard, or at the stores in Chicota, Texas, and listen as the adults talked. From the old men there, who Miss Esther called the Spit and Whittle Club, I learned about farming, the weather, cattle, stock prices (which didn’t register much at the time), hunting, fishing, and “adult” issues which were vastly more interesting.
The family get-togethers I mentioned provided some information, including the story about an old man who stayed with my grandparents when Mama was little. He’d been captured by Indians (they never said what tribe) and somehow escaped one night. Tiring, he crawled into a hollow log. Laying there in the darkness and holding his breath, he counted the steps of each pursuer who placed a foot on the downed tree as they raced after him. I recall it was over twenty.
I know nothing else about the incident she related, and have often wondered about the rest of her tale.
Miss Esther told me her mother burned to death in front of her while making soap when my grandmother was little, I know nothing else other than she’s buried in a cemetery in Grant, OK, (which Miss Esther often said), but I never asked her exactly where or drove her up there to point out the plot.
I do have a fading photo of her and her siblings along with my great-grandfather on the porch after the funeral. It was 1913 and kids are barefoot, though their clothes look somewhat fresh, and the looks on their faces are blank from that great tragedy. I want to know more now, but the opportunity is long gone.
That leads us to the next regret. Family lore says we have some Choctaw blood, but there’s no marriage license between great-grandma Minne and Miss Esther’s daddy, Ed Gentry. With that missing piece of the puzzle, we’re stymied, which leads us back to the beginning of this discussion.
After John Grits finished his presentation, I borrowed his Dawes Roll and looked up Minnie Roberson. A four-year-old was listed, and two lines underneath was my grandmother’s first name, but it was Esther Roberson (maybe someone she’s named after?), but the dates didn’t seem to add up, and those folks were from northeast Oklahoma.
The National Archives explains “The Dawes Rolls, also known as the “Final Rolls,” are the lists of individuals who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership in the “Five Civilized Tribes:” Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminoles. Those found eligible for the Final Rolls were entitled to an allotment of land, usually a homestead. The Rolls contain more than 101,000 names from 1898-1914 (primarily from 1899-1906).”
So…we might be Cherokee, or Choctaw (a tiny, tiny percentage), or not. The names I found might not even be them, but that’s not the point here, either. This discussion isn’t primarily about the rolls, or ancestry, but is a way for me to urge y’all to talk to those who are still around and record their lives, and your family stories.
With today’s technology, it’s as easy as pushing a button on your phone and leading them to tell what the remember. I know, we had tape recorders back in the day and I didn’t use them because the tapes and pushing all those buttons was intrusive. People looked at those devices like I’d put a live snake on the table.
But a deft push on a cell phone screen is so common no one will notice, and if they do, quickly forgotten, and you might be able to hear stories that wouldn’t come out any other way. Be careful, though. My own grandmother didn’t want to talk about some of those old times because, “We all have skeletons in our closets and should leave the doors closed.”
Like so many people through generations back, it never occurred to me that I should have been looking to find out more about those who’re already gone. I also want to know the stories they told, what they lived through, and what they knew about their own grandparents, relatives, and beyond.
Before people started writing these things down, information was passed down in the form of tales and recollections around the campfire, and in front of the fireplace and stoves. They also spun them under the stars, and I got some of that in the evenings beneath the dripping mimosa tree, or the sweet-smelling sycamores while lightning bugs flashed around us.
Now we have air conditioning, cell phones, and computers, and don’t go visiting like they did. People are more interested in television programs, movies, inaccurately titled Reality TV, or those damned devices in our hands.
It became easier to watch television and no talk, and soon there was no need to entertain each other with recall about what happened when my ancestors crossed the red River from Oklahoma and Arkansas, or on Dad’s side, through the southern states and up from Houston to Lamar County.
Folks, it’s a crying shame that most kids know a quarter of their family history that should have been passed down through the years, mine included. My grandparents all married right after the turn of the twentieth century, survived scratch farms, this country’s involvement in WWI, the Great Depression (which made them who they were), WWII, and even Korea, before I came along, but I don’t know enough about what they went through, what they liked and disliked, or what they knew of the Armstrong/Wortham/Vanderberg/Gentry stories.
John Grits admitted he only knows a small piece of what his own family experienced in those horrible times for his people, and laughed when he said his grandmother always knew there was a foot trail on their Missouri property, but not the story behind it.
Only a few years ago this man who’s closing in on 80 found out that trail down behind the house where he was born and delivered by his own grandmother was the Trail of Tears his people survived. His great-grandmother had walked that trail herself, but apparently assumed her daughter and family knew.
The stories that are getting away from us will be lost forever unless you, and I, record them in some way. Gather those stories and cherish them, and for your writers, it’s a fountain of ideas for future works.
I recently read—okay, started—a book that I set aside after three chapters. I’d received the book at Left Coast Crime, when one of the publishers hosted an “open house” for its authors in attendance and they had stacks of their books to sign and give away. I accepted almost all of them. It would have been rude to tell them you weren’t interested, especially since the books were free. I have giveaways via my newsletter, and I figured the books would be put to good use, either before or after I read them.
Villains are always useful in helping protagonists overcome their shortcomings and face down danger. An example of this was the film “Die Hard” where the protagonist John McClane (Bruce Willis) matches wits with the villainous deuteragonist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman.)
ker already has her hands full, what with running the busy Fir Grove branch library, helping her flaky actor brother with his latest onstage project, and caring for an orphaned kitten that shows up outside the branch.
I’ve posted before about our beloved dog Kimber, a mix of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Boston Terrier called a Caviston. (And yes, it bothers me that it’s not spelled Cavaston, but no one consulted me.) When we first moved to the woodland house in West Virginia, she weighed less than five pounds and I was keenly aware that the entire world posed one big hazard for her. Not only was she prey to most other creatures, her girth was smaller than that of the floor vents which hadn’t yet been covered.
Once permitted to wander her fenced domain alone during the day, she turned into quite the squirrel hunter, chasing them great distances until the critters cheated and shot up a tree. I don’t think Kimber ever figured out why she couldn’t follow. She’s an avid deer chaser, too, though I’m not sure of her plan for when she caught one.
Last week was reasonably cool for a June afternoon, so we left the downstairs door open to allow Kimber to come and go as she pleased to and from the back yard. My office sits on the second floor, overlooking the backyard and the woods beyond. I was doing as I always do while staring down the maw of an approaching deadline, pounding away on the keyboard, playing with my imaginary friends when a cacophony erupted from out beyond my windows.